“The Torrent with the Many Hues of Heaven”: the Replacement Of

0 “The Torrent With the Many Hues of Heaven”: The Replacement of Traditional Morality in Works of Lord Byron Devon Carter Mr. Markley AP Literature 17 April 2015 1 The first years of the nineteenth century were, to put it mildly, a turbulent time. In the Americas, the old colonial empires were crumbling into new nations; in Europe, the most powerful countries in the world reeled under the rapid dominion and equally rapid fall of Napoleon Bonaparte; and in England, literary Romanticism began to flower with the works of George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron. Strangely enough, it was the last that gained, in the words of John Wilson, a contemporary reviewer, the “sudden and entire possession,” (Wilson, quoted in Beatty, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: Cantos I and II in 1812,” paragraph 1) of English and European consciousness. Critic Bernard Beatty believes that this occurred because “Byron presents the same torrential change that his readers had been forced to recognise [sic], a world out of control…They were excited and appalled by visions of apocalyptic destruction in contemporary history, art, religious movements and poems…but Byron, like them, also embodied a yearning for return to the old vivifying centres [sic] of stability.” (Beatty, “1812,” paragraph 25). While Beatty identifies an important, even fundamental, tension in Byron’s political views, which often seem to embrace relics of the past while simultaneously taking an unprecedented moral stance, he resolves it incorrectly. Byron is no herald of the apocalypse, but quite the opposite. He explores the consequences of an eternal world in his plays Marino Faliero, The Two Foscari, Manfred, and Cain, as well as his epic poems Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage . In these works of Lord Byron, the forms of classical tragedy are consistently used, subverted, and examined. This expanded tragic framework rewards balance between the divine and the earthly, as the mental state of a triumphant Byronic hero mirrors the cosmological state of the world; ultimately, this asserts a revolutionary moral code rooted in the individual rather than apocalyptic metaphysics. 2 In general, Byronic literature is highly self-conscious of its place in the Western literary canon, and characterized by allusions, parodies, and even direct refutations of historical or contemporary works. This intense self-awareness invites the application of Aristotle’s Poetics , the definitive work on literature for thousands of years, to classify the frameworks Byron’s works consciously utilize. Aristotle identifies Comedy, Tragedy, and Epic as the three genres of poetry. Regardless of his sarcasm and use of satire, Byron is not, according to the classical definition, a comic poet, because “Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life,” (Aristotle, Poetics, Part II). All Byronic heroes are larger-than-life figures and not at all farcical, placing Byron – at least to himself and his contemporaries – firmly in the double realm of Epic and Tragedy; therefore, it is these structures of which his works have a profound awareness. As Aristotle contends that “all the elements of an Epic poem are found in Tragedy, but the elements of a Tragedy are not all found in the Epic” (Part V) because Epic is an “extension” (Part XVII) of the Tragic form with more liberties, it is natural that Byron worked with both forms together. His awareness of the forms is again illustrated by his adherence to Aristotle’s idea that Tragedy will “confine itself to a single revolution of the sun” (Part V) in its temporal frame, showing a snapshot of the critical dramatic period. Shakespeare, two hundred years earlier, did not use this convention: Hamlet makes a sea voyage halfway to England and back, Othello travels from Venice to Cyprus and waits several days before his tragedy culminates, and Richard III is crowned and deposed over a historical span of three years within one play. Byron’s choice to observe the Aristotelian temporal unity was clearly not required of an English playwright of his time; his rigid adherence in the case of Manfred, Cain, Marino Faliero, and The Two Foscari therefore draws attention to his other uses of the classical tragic form. 3 Byronic heroes also conform to the Aristotelian model, in that they are the sort of “characters of a higher type,” ( Poetics, Part V) Aristotle recommends for Tragedy and Epic. Whether by a “lineage long” (Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , I.3.20), “more than Roman fortitude” (Byron, The Two Foscari , I.i), or comparisons with Caesar and Catiline (Byron, Marino Faliero , I.ii), they acquire an air of antiquity and power. The classical allusions draw attention again to the classical poetic models, as well as invoking the ancient strength of the Roman Empire in order to ennoble the hero. These empowered characters, however, seem to invite tragedy as well; they “live, but live to die,” (Byron, Cain, I.i.109-110) are “sent to the devil,” (Byron, Don Juan , I.1.8) and even when alive “walk the rocks / and forests like a wolf, [and] turn aside / from men and their delights,” (Byron, Manfred, III.iii.23-25). They suffer or are poised to suffer, and often are acutely aware of the fact. The overall effect of this setup is a conventional tragedy involving the destruction of a noble hero. This tragedy is, at least on the surface, often played straight with no obvious modifications to its traditional structure. Harold “fades away into Destruction’s mass” ( CHP, IV.164.1476) at the end of his poem, dragged down by his ennui and lack of purpose. Cain’s Biblical tragedy plays out its inevitable end, and he is convicted by his “slain brother’s blood [crying] out / even from the ground, unto the Lord!” ( Cain , III.i.469-471). They are punished, not only for their failings and sins, but by the logical extension of them. In this form of adherence to tragic frameworks, there is a resolution to one of the most immediate paradoxes in Byron’s works. As Alan Rawes puts it, ““…if the Byronic aspiration to freedom is real, and Byron does champion (or at least celebrate) the ‘strong and bold and free’, [sic] why do so few of his characters achieve any kind of freedom…?” (Rawes, paragraph 3). Rawes explains this tension by tracing what he calls a Calvinistic view of sin and punishment where transgression 4 leads inevitably to predestined damnation; while this is not inaccurate, perhaps a more general view would be to see that the celebrated “strong and bold and free” heroes are also tragic figures, though no less admirable because of that. The ideals of a better world are illustrated in the men the flawed contemporary world pulls down, the men who achieve no freedom precisely because they actively seek it. This allows the “Byronic aspiration to freedom” in the future to coexist with, and even enhance “the epitome of [his] Weltschmerɀ,” (Rawes, paragraph 3) or world- weariness, for the present. In the works of Byron, however, subtle subversions of the classical tragic themes are present, demonstrating an expansion of the ostensibly obeyed framework. While Manfred is condemned to be his own “proper Hell” ( Manfred, I.i.251) on account of his guilt and desire for forgetfulness, his pride and arrogance are the failings he demonstrates within the work itself. His guilt is merely an informed aspect of his character – we do not see the sin he punishes himself for. In a classical tragic plot, his pride and arrogance would destroy him, yet those same qualities are what allows him to subjugate the spirit world and speak with his dead lover Astarte. Without his failings, he could not have reached the point in Act III where he can “deem / the golden secret, the sought ‘Kalon,’ found, and seated in [his] soul,” (III.i.13-14) and be at peace before his last trials. Don Juan, a reinvention of a stock character, is also saved by his traditional failings when his love affair with Catherine the Great leads to his life being saved from a Russian illness (Don Juan , X.44.345-351). These aversions of seemingly inevitable tragedy indicate the presence of a tension between the traditional morality which condemns these traits and a Byronic morality which applauds them. In addition to avoided tragedies, the actualized ones are often presented in a way that calls into question the justice or rightness of the tragic event. The biblical Mark of Cain “burns” 5 Cain, but is “nought to that which is within” his guilty spirit ( Cain, III.i.500-501). For the same reason, Adam refrains from censuring his fratricidal son, saying “his spirit be his curse,” (III.i.451). Cain considers the punishment of God to be outside of the punishment of his own spirit, as does Adam. The justice comes from within; the Angel of the Lord only adds insult to injury and is not the actual minister of justice. No outside force has an impact within the Byronic tragic form; Manfred dismisses a Mephistophelian demon, saying his “past power / was purchased by no compact” ( Manfred, III.iv.113-114) in which he would have forfeited his soul. While Manfred rejects Christianity in the form of the Abbot and Chamois Hunter, he found his sacrilegious power within himself and is therefore saved from externalized Hell – though not, as mentioned above, from his own internal hell of guilt. No external judgment is valid; when the senators tell Doge Faliero he will “within an hour be in [God’s] presence,” the Doge replies “I am already,” ( Faliero , V.i) rejecting their authority over his internal spiritual life.

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